The List Never Became Routine: Tulsi Gabbard on War, Power, and the Six-Minute Decision

In 2005, at the height of the Iraq War, Tulsi Gabbard was a twenty-something from Hawaii who had left her state-legislature seat to deploy with the Hawaii National Guard. She served in a medical unit. Her brigade had about 3,000 soldiers operating in four parts of Iraq, and her first task every day was to work through a roster of every combat-related injury from the day before — name, unit, sometimes location, and the wound — looking for anyone from home. If a familiar name appeared, she tracked the soldier: Was the care enough to stay in country? Did they need to go to Landstuhl and Ramstein in Germany, then to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas for burns, or to Walter Reed, and then all the way home to their families?

It never became paperwork. “It never became a routine task,” she tells Lex Fridman. “It never became like, ‘Okay, cool, check the list.’” Friends of hers were killed. Behind every name was a husband or wife, parents, sons and daughters who did not know what the front actually looked like, only what the news showed. She felt the tension in her parents’ voices on rare calls home. After she returned, her father told her that every time television showed a helicopter down or an IED, the family held its breath until they knew who it was.

Some wounds looked minor; traumatic brain injury was barely discussed. Visible injuries mixed with invisible ones. Soldiers who had to be evacuated often felt guilty for leaving friends, not sorry for themselves. In a war zone, she says, it is not about Washington. It is about getting the job done and coming home together. Infantry friends from Hawaii and American Samoa described raids and patrols that left no physical mark and a great deal of emotional stress. Culturally, the Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, and Saipan soldiers tried something the unit they replaced had not: muzzles pointed at the sky instead of at people on the street, shakas from the Humvee, tea and bread with locals. Casualties fell. Townspeople started warning them about holes in the road and weapons caches.

The camp was one of the larger ones in Iraq, and almost nothing happened there without a KBR Halliburton logo. Dick Cheney, she notes, had been connected with the company. The dining facility, the DFAC, served four meals a day. KBR brought in workers from Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines to cook and clean. Curious what taxpayers were paying, she asked around. A soldier who walked in, grabbed a banana, and walked out still counted as about $35 a head, four times a day, for thousands of people.

Hawaii has a large Filipino community, and Hawaiian soldiers befriended the Filipino workers, who often cooked real food on rice cookers behind the tents. Average pay, they told her, was about $500 a month for porta-potties, trash, the DFAC, laundry — twelve-hour days, maybe one day off a week, two weeks at home every other year. She puts the two numbers together: one company, in her telling, making trillions, and a Filipino mother on $500 a month. Growing up in Hawaii she had not thought about that. After the deployment she could not go back to the old life. She wanted to influence the politicians who launch regime-change wars and send people in uniform — and to ask, to what end?

Lex asks how a firm gets away with bananas at that price. They will claim, she says, that moving logistics through a country at war is expensive. What actually protects the model is political connections, lobbyists, and the cozy Congress-industry relationship Eisenhower warned against in 1961. She does not think you can overstate the military-industrial complex. The Pentagon revolving door is in the open: senior uniformed officers and Defense civilians working their way toward a payout. The sitting secretary of defense, she says, retired as a general, sat on a major contractor’s board, and came back as secretary. Congress does the same — people who write contracts later work for the winner; people who write policy do likewise. The machine can be slowed, she believes, but only by a free people using the rights in the Constitution.

Lex notes that Gabbard has been called both hawk and dove. Her test is simple and high: war is justified when it is in the best interest of national security, when diplomacy is exhausted, and when it is the last route left to protect the safety, security, and freedom of the American people. The mess is in the details. After 9/11, many wars were waged in the name of the “war on terrorism,” including, she says, Patriot Act surveillance that was not justified. She supported the first Afghanistan mission: a relatively small force going after al-Qaeda cells and Osama bin Laden. That is the mission that should have been focused and finished.

Attention, she says, was diverted to a regime-change war in Iraq sold on false pretenses. Afghanistan inflated into governance and the Taliban; al-Qaeda and bin Laden became secondary. Even generals struggled to say what the objective was, what winning looked like, and when it would be time to leave. The Afghanistan Papers showed the answers to those basic questions shifting over a very long time. In Iraq she had bought a lot of what the administration and both parties in Congress were selling. On the ground her eyes opened: they had been lied to on a large scale. The long war, and the decisions around it, strengthened al-Qaeda, helped create ISIS, and undermined U.S. security. “Understanding the enemy that you are trying to defeat is essential to being able to build a strategy.”

A president can declare the war on terror over. In her 2021 deployment to East Africa and Somalia, al-Shabaab — sharing ideology with al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas, and a major regional funder of al-Qaeda — had been allowed to grow. The enemy’s goal, as she states it, is an Islamic caliphate, the destruction of Israel, the extermination of Jews, and kill-or-convert for everyone else. The longer leaders bury their heads, the stronger those groups get. The fight is military and ideological. She told Congress during the Obama years that the ideological line was failing because the administration, afraid of the “Islamophobe” label, would not name the ideology and substituted “countering violent extremism.” If you will not say who the enemy is and why they act, you will not stop the attack. Imams she saw in Somalia and Iraq who treated the terrorists as a threat to their own people used Islamic teaching against that ideology. “I’m not a pacifist, I’m a realist.”

Lex puts the bind bluntly. Israel says it will destroy Hamas, yet every civilian death can be a catalyst for hate, possibly generational hate. From Israel’s side, what is the right response to October 7th? Gabbard calls it a complex question. Israel’s approach, she says, has to draw that line as far as possible — hard when Hamas is interwoven with Gaza’s population — and still recognize a shared purpose: Palestinians living free of that terrorist group’s oppression, Israelis living free of a group that wants to exterminate them.

Israeli politics, she adds, is not a separate conversation. Some people in the Israeli government do not want Palestinians in Gaza at all and want them resettled in other countries. She thinks that is a big problem that further feeds hatred and resentment. The tension between many Israelis and many Palestinians is generations long. It can be resolved, in her view, only when strong leaders on both sides are willing to let the past stay in the past and find a path to peace.

Asked how she hopes the war in Ukraine ends, Gabbard does not detour. The only ending is a brokered dialogue between representatives of Russia and Ukraine, an agreement neither side will fully like, with concessions on both sides, so both can walk away. What she finds heartbreaking is that efforts to do exactly that began weeks after the invasion and were, in her account, thwarted by the Biden-Harris administration and other Western powers, at the cost of innocent lives. She has friends in Ukraine and has been there more than once. They tell her they fear husbands being conscripted, fear being yanked off the street, and they talk about friends and family already killed.

Should an American president sit Zelenskyy and Putin down together? In an ideal world, yes, and long ago. Whether Biden is the right broker is another question. From the start, she says, the administration’s comments pointed toward an objective of destroying Russia — one reason they backed a long war and blocked peace efforts. The best person is whoever can be an effective neutral. The administration’s job now, as she frames it, is to encourage Zelenskyy to begin. Lex says he is called naive for believing there is a human on the other side — even humor, even in private. Gabbard does not think that is naive. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had to find a secret channel to Khrushchev around commanders urging military action: neither man wanted a catastrophic nuclear war. Lex raises Chamberlain and Hitler. Her reply is short: be smart; don’t be hoodwinked.

Gabbard went to Syria in 2017 and met Bashar al-Assad. Running for president, she was attacked for refusing to call him a war criminal. Leaders, she says, need the courage to meet allies and adversaries in pursuit of peace and understanding. If policy is made through bureaucrats and media with their own interests, a president or a member of Congress cannot decide with the clarity the public needs. Those meetings are weaponized. If you are outside the official narrative — then, a regime-change war in Syria — you are an outcast.

She met Assad, religious leaders, people on the streets of Damascus, college students, opposition figures who wanted him replaced, local law enforcement. The charge that came back was that she loves dictators. “It’s a sad state of affairs,” she says, “when some of the most influential voices in our country will label someone a lover or supporter of dictators, simply because you’re saying, ‘Hey, we shouldn’t be going to war. There is another way.’” Iraq War opponents got similar labels until opposition became fashionable. The same treatment, she says, now falls on her, Tucker Carlson, and others who argue against a proxy war with Russia that uses Ukrainian lives. Suddenly you are a Putin lover, a puppet, a traitor — accusations used by people who do not want a substantive argument.

She came home expecting to widen the picture. Mainstream media and Congress, she found, had zero interest in any view but their own: arm and equip known terrorists in Syria to overthrow the regime, with no realistic idea who would take power. No opposition group they might prop up, she says, could withstand the terrorist organizations whose goal was to seize the state. Lex offers a parallel: if Putin is overthrown, whoever comes next may be less liberal and less dovish, and the U.S. complex will feed that thirst. When the Wagner chief looked ready to launch a coup, she recalls MSNBC and Rachel Maddow celebrating without asking who he was, what he had done in other countries, or what his rule would mean for security and peace.

She dates the smear. Her first day in Congress was about January 3, 2013; her last was January 3, 2021. For nearly eight years she sat on Foreign Affairs and Armed Services, driven, she says, to challenge the military-industrial complex and stop needless wars. That Hillary Clinton and Washington’s warmongers disliked her was not a shock. The timing still was. In February 2019, the hour she walked onstage in Hawaii to announce a presidential run, NBC News published a hit piece planting the idea that she was a darling of Putin. Baseless, she calls it, and it ran as a drumbeat through the campaign.

It escalated when Hillary Clinton, on David Axelrod’s podcast, said the Russians were “grooming her.” The speaker was a former secretary of state, senator, and first lady with lasting power in the Democratic Party. There was, Gabbard says, no basis — a tired, dependable playbook used by Clinton, Mitt Romney, and others to destroy people who question war aims. If you believe in a war, she says, make the case to the public and on the House floor, and let the other side speak. Instead they tell voters not to trust the person. She and colleagues trying to strip the Patriot Act’s worst Fourth Amendment violations were called traitors; members warned that passing the bill would make them responsible for the next 9/11. The same treatment, she says, has hit Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Rand Paul. A small, growing group, at least on the Republican side as she sees it, is willing to challenge both parties’ warmongers.

Lex notes that the left also challenged warmongers for decades. She agrees — less so recently — and that is a foremost reason she left the Democratic Party, a story she gives a chapter in *For Love of Country*. Democrats she knew as dependable on civil liberties and against war-for-war’s-sake have gone largely silent; challenge the Biden administration on foreign policy and you hear about it. Lex describes a mass hysteria over Ukraine: Putin bad, good versus evil, and any talk of how to get peace puts you on the side of evil. She calls that pretty sick. He hopes the complex is not quite that powerful and that it only captures a natural wish to fight for good. She admires the hope. From experience, the national-security state, the complex, and powerful media outlets “don’t have any qualms at destroying those who try to get in the way of their power.” Eisenhower put the warning in a farewell address, she says, because a free people are the only real counterweight.

Lex has just spoken with Annie Jacobsen about a second-by-second nuclear scenario: one person can start it, the machinery is hard to stop, tactical weapons do not stay tactical, nuclear winter, billions dead slowly. How do you avoid that? The first need, Gabbard says, is to understand it. Pundits and politicians now talk as if a nuclear war can be won, as if tactical weapons “send a message” without climbing toward civilizational destruction. They talk as if it were just another war. Ronald Reagan, she says, was right: a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be waged. People who make or benefit from the weapons will say it will never happen. Do not buy it.

She points to a New York City Emergency Management PSA on what to do when “the big one” hits: get inside, stay inside, stay tuned — away from windows, wait for all-clear, follow the office on Instagram and Twitter. The closer was “We’ve got this.” She would find it funny if it were not so out of touch, a tornado checklist hung on a nuclear attack, reflecting a careless official attitude even as policy pushes closer to the brink, including the accidental launches of the last Cold War. She cites the documentary *The Man Who Saved the World*: a mid-level officer who did not fire on a radar mistake. Lex adds Jacobsen’s point that the machinery is so organized humans need not think. The only person who can inject the big picture is the president, who has about six minutes after an early warning. That, Lex says, is what he is voting on — someone who will think independently, not ride warmongering momentum in the room.

Gabbard agrees. The prevailing opinion in those crisis rooms, not specific to one party, is a knee-jerk toward an act of war. Voices of peace, or people who say pause and think it through, are smeared and canceled. Even advocating options A, B, and C is treated as heresy. So people who know in their hearts it could end badly self-censor. They do not want the wrath of four-stars, secretaries of state and defense. They do not want to be the one who says take a breath and run second-, third-, and fourth-order effects. Lex finds it strange that asking for an Afghanistan or Iraq exit plan, every day, takes courage. They are not dumb questions, she says. From outside, “no war” is easy; from inside an institution, “maybe let’s not” is hard. Behind the complex is money and power, more proven over time than even pharma. The presidency, they both note, has the legal power to fire people, start and stop wars. Too often the office is assumed from weakness, from fear of losing power. That is why she wants leaders rooted in the Constitution — and why she turns next to a bill sold as being about TikTok.

The bill racing through Congress with bipartisan support in the name of national security is, Gabbard says, a power grab and an assault on liberty. TikTok is not actually in the text. It gives the executive — in practice a cabinet secretary — the power to decide who is a foreign adversary, without agreement from Congress. A social-media platform with at least 20 percent ownership tied to that designation may be barred from doing business in America. It is not only foreign states. If an American citizen has at least a 25 percent financial interest, and the executive decides that person is under the influence or control of a named adversary, the platform must divest and that American is barred from the business.

She walks the logic toward Elon Musk. Biden and people in his administration have already implied that Musk’s activities need investigation; Tesla does business in many countries, including China. It is not a stretch, she says, to imagine X next: designate the owner, shut the platform. Democrats accuse him of election interference while he claims a free-speech stance and refuses White House-directed account-by-account control. Platforms that have already censored at the government’s behest are not the targets. Ron Paul called the bill the greatest assault on liberty since the Patriot Act. Lex, who hates TikTok for rotting his brain and knows the China security arguments, says the Trojan horse got him. Data security is real, Gabbard replies; have that conversation. Do not let the government tell people what they may see and say. The way to defeat bad speech is better speech, which is what the founders envisioned.

The House passed it fast; Biden said he would sign it. She is only slightly encouraged that the Senate is at least naming free-speech and civil-liberties concerns. She will not claim cautious optimism. There is also a VPN clause: using a VPN to reach a banned service could mean legal trouble, which implies a surveillance question — how would they know? Peel the onion, she says, and it leads to a dark, oppressive place. Lex calls it a huge problem if government gets say over the platforms people use to talk to one another, whether or not one likes Musk.

Gabbard was a longtime Democrat and a DNC vice chair until she resigned in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders. Officers had to stay neutral in a primary. She intended to. What she saw, quickly, was Debbie Wasserman Schultz making unilateral decisions — often learned by tweet — that tilted the scales toward Hillary Clinton, and a press that called Clinton the most qualified person ever to run while glossing the record, especially in foreign policy. The job is commander in chief, a role where a president can act more unilaterally than on education or immigration. As a soldier and veteran that was a problem. She resigned so she could tell voters Clinton had been, in her phrase, “the queen of warmongers,” while Sanders was largely a non-interventionist at heart. What she likes most about Sanders is that he is who he is, unapologetically, whether one agrees or not.

She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 and left the party. In *For Love of Country* the core claim is that Democrats have become opposed to freedom and to the founding documents — controlled by an elitist warmonger cabal driving a “woke agenda”: racializing everything, “defund the police,” open borders, education policy that fails children, and a rejection of objective truth. She is particularly sharp on girls’ sports and the word *woman*, which she calls hypocrisy and an act of hatred toward women from a party that long claimed to be the most feminist. Under every issue, she says, is an insatiable hunger for power, a willingness to destroy the republic, democracy, and freedom in order to hold more of it.

Lex will not let Republicans off. She does not either. The book’s prologue, she notes, says not to be naive: both parties have politicians so afraid of losing power they will take freedom away, because free people making even wrong decisions are the threat to remaining in office. The difference now, as she sees it, is that Democrats require lockstep or they destroy you — making examples of her and Kennedy. Republicans have done that too, and they have leaders who feed the Washington establishment, but they also have growing dissenting voices. She puts Trump in that category, against “norms” represented by Nikki Haley or Mike Pence. The next election, she argues, is less party versus party than a chance to fire anti-freedom warmongers and hire people committed to the Constitution. Nobody is perfect; nobody belongs on a pedestal.

Lex asks for strengths and limits of Biden and Trump. She has known Biden for years and knew his son Beau, who served in the Guard in the same period; she considered Biden a friend, someone she had talked and laughed with. The qualities that drew her to the older Biden, she says, are not how he has led. He promised in the inaugural to be a president for all Americans and, in the campaign, uniter in chief. At every turn he has done the opposite and left the country more divided, less secure economically and in national security, and less free. Lex nominates Obama as the most effective uniter of recent decades, at least in rhetoric. She grants the 2008 campaign: people cried on election night, friends set lives aside for “hope and change,” then went to Washington and told her how quickly they were heartbroken. Instead of a new generation, he surrounded himself with the same old problem. As a senator he had warned about the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance; as president, facing leaks about that surveillance on his watch, he sided with the national-security state.

Why is the Oval Office so hard on campaign ideals? What drives you, she asks, and what are you afraid of — reelection money, the presidential library, the legacy. There are documented cases, she says, of a promised crackdown on big pharma abandoned when Justice Department campaign funding was threatened, even with a strong opioid case. That is why she wants leaders resistant to money and power, knowing people are fallible. For Trump, the lesson she hopes he learned from 2016 is to surround himself with people of courage, not the next cable contract or the next monetized job — people who will clean house. He went in with a largely non-interventionist, peace-focused agenda, she says, and then staffed the heart of Washington’s warmongers, who went against his own policies.

His strength, in her account, is also why he is attacked with a force she has not seen in her lifetime. He has been successful in his own life, so he does not arrive hungry to please Washington. He will challenge “norms” that serve the most powerful, not the public, which makes him a direct threat. The lack of a politician’s caution — not needing to be the popular one at the party — is the asset. Lex has heard Dana White describe Trump as psychologically resistant to attacks that break other people. That is the hinge into how Gabbard herself survives them.

How does she metabolize years of attack without turning cynical or overcorrecting? A clear sense of purpose, she says. State government, Honolulu city council, Congress — none of it was a “political career,” and she does not have the ladder-climbing ambition she sees in many politicians. The purpose is to be pleasing to God and to live a life of service. “What better way to be pleasing to God than to try to do my best to work for the well-being of God’s children.” Attacks from former friends, colleagues, even family still hurt. She does not live to please politicians or people on television. Happiness, fulfillment, and strength come from trying to please God.

Faith, she tells Lex, is everything: identity, inspiration, motivation, strength, peace, shelter, happiness. In challenge, darkness, heartbreak, and happiness she has felt God’s unconditional love as ever present. God is her best friend. Remembering that, meditating on it, keeps her centered. Lex notes how welcoming Hindu practice can be of other religions. A common misunderstanding, she says, is that Hinduism is not monotheistic. There is one God, with many names for different qualities. It is a non-sectarian spiritual practice, not something you convert into and leave. The Bhagavad Gita, “Song of God,” offers principles she calls timeless for Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus alike.

Bedtime stories came from both the Gita and the New Testament. Her father was raised Catholic, her mother Episcopalian; both were drawn to the Gita while looking for a more personal relationship with God. Bhakti yoga, as she explains it, is dedicating a life to a loving relationship with God. Karma yoga is dedicating action to a positive effect on others, service. As a child she never understood sectarian religion at war with itself, because she experienced religion as love for God, whatever the name or form of worship. In anxious or sad quiet moments she turns to God as confidant for solace, clarity, and the strength to do the right thing. Lex closes the episode with Eisenhower’s 1961 words: a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions is new in the American experience; in the councils of government, guard against unwarranted influence, sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.